Smashing Pumpkins Won’t Be Playing any of Those Full-Album Album Anniversary Shows
Everyone from Garbage to Brian Wilson (and many, many more) have embarked on album anniversary treks, trotting out their classic full-lengths from front to back. One person you won’t see participating in the nostalgia-driven touring market? Staunch contrarian Billy Corgan.
Last year, the Smashing Pumpkins’ beloved Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness celebrated its 20th birthday, but Corgan won’t take it on the road for a victory lap any time soon. “The idea of getting up and playing an album that was never meat to be played live in that sequence smacks of consumerism,” he told Rolling Stone. “That stuff is the dregs of the music business. I have a hard time believing that everybody out there doing it really wants to do it.”
Likewise, Siames Dream, which will soon turn 23, has become a favorite among the band’s younger, millennial fans. Still, Corgan says he won’t revisit old material while he’s still as prolific as he was two decades ago. “I’m not gonna go out there and hack around just to reclaim some light that I don’t feel has gone out,” the Pumpkins frontman said. “The light is still in my eyes. I’m still more than capable of producing new work. I wrote a new song this morning and that’s what I’m out here doing.”
The Smashing Pumpkins released Monuments to an Elegy in 2014. Corgan and company will kick off their In Plainsong tour later this month. Right now, the singer is working on a cross-country documentary and writing a new Pumpkins album along the way.